In the best seats in the house sat the majority of the country’s most important politicians: São Paulo’s mayor, Prestes Maia, his counterpart from Rio and the interventores of the states of São Paulo, Rio and Minas Gerais, together with Vargas, his wife and his daughter. The mayor’s speech was typical of the era. Oleaginous, circuitous, at times obsequious, he was, when not just lauding Vargas, almost grovelling. He praised Vargas, the regime and the navy, and indulged in a nationalist eugenic fantasy so intense that he envisaged ‘every citizen mimicking the legendary Hercules’, able to ‘take Brazil on their shoulders’. He also suggested that the president’s spirit was the key to making the project work and asked His Excellency if he would kindly do all present the honour of opening the stadium. In reply Vargas was rather less florid and made, in his sidelong manner, two key political points: first, that the stadium was about more than sport, for sport had to serve other ends:
These clean lines, this beautiful imposing mass of concrete and steel, will be just an architectural symbol unless it affirms and supports the efforts of our new regime to implement its programme . . . this monumental sporting playground is for a healthy patriotism, for the purposes of physical education and civic education.2
And second, that this wasn’t just São Paulo’s show, this was Brazil’s, and they had better not forget that:
The Pacaembu stadium is a matter for you, made by your contribution and efforts . . . and yet you understand that this monument marks the greatness of São Paulo in the service of Brazil.3
The following day the stadium saw swimming, boxing and fencing competitions before a capacity crowd watched a double header of São Paulo teams against clubs from other states – Palestra Itália vs Coritiba, and Corinthians vs Atlético Mineiro – still a rarity in Brazil where competitive club football was organized at state rather than national level.
In 1942 the Pacaembu was fully integrated into the Estado Novo’s national pantheon when it hosted Labour Day. Some 70,000 people watched the scouts, the police and the fire brigade and swooned at the low-flying aircraft putting on a display overhead. From the stands of the most modern stadium in South America the crowd cheered the workers of Volta Redonda – the new city rising on the banks of the Paraíba do Sul in Rio state, where Brazil would build its, and South America’s, first steel plant.
When in 1927 Flamengo won their last Carioca Championship of the amateur era they were, like their neighbours and rivals Fluminense, an elite sports and social club whose members overwhelmingly came from Rio’s upper classes. The club’s president, Rivadavia Meyer, was among the most vocal opponents of professionalism, revolted by the prospect of mixing it on the pitch with the people. By the late 1940s, the team was, without question, the most popular in Brazil – not just in Rio but, uniquely for the time, with a truly national following. Flamengo could fill stadiums in north-eastern cities like Recife and Natal, as well as at home. While other clubs might claim to be popular clubs, Flamengo claimed it was the people’s.
This remarkable shift was led by José Bastos Padilha, the wealthy owner of a printing company, and president of the club between 1936 and 1939. Padilha is an example of the ways in which practical and ideological initiatives emerging from civil society gave real content to the regime’s notion of Brasilidade. Having made the club’s peace with professionalism, Padilha recognized that, under the new economic circumstances of professionalism and mass paying audiences, success would only come from having a bigger membership and bigger attendance and that in turn would require a better team and better headlines in the press that football fans were consuming in increasing amounts. To these ends he raised the money to build a new stadium, the Gávea, on what was a lakeside quagmire in the Zona Sul. Membership qualifications were eased, a recruitment drive was conducted and over a decade the club added another 10,000 sócios to its roster. The club bought into the newspaper Jornal dos Sports where they teamed up with the editor, Mário Filho. Together they began to crank up the level of Flamengo news and hype, and Filho would, in time, turn their history into pure golden myth. If you couldn’t get the people to Flamengo, Flamengo would go to them. A combination of nationwide coverage of the team on radio and national tours by the squad saw it establish a considerable body of support in almost every city in the country.
Back in Rio crowds grew as Padilha invested money in a new team. First, he bought Argentinians, who at one point comprised almost half the starting eleven. He added the tactical innovations of the Hungarian coach Dori Kürschner, who brought the new thinking of Danubian football to Rio. Then, in a populist masterstroke, he hired the three leading black players of the day, Fausto, Domingos da Guia and Leônidas da Silva. No clearer statement of the new Flamengo could have been made. When Fluminense fans began to chant ‘Pó de carvão’ (‘coal dust’) at them, Flamengo fans took it up themselves as a celebration of the club’s openness to poor, black Brazilians.
Alongside the commercial sporting spectacle, Padilha had an ideological agenda. For him, the youth of Brazil, whom he referred to as Generation Flamengo, were going to be remade as healthy, socialized patriots through their love of sport and their love of club. Flamengo began to set up a range of educational and sporting programmes for working-class children. As Padilha himself put it:
We made the courses completely free to all the boys and girls of the city up to fifteen years old, poor or rich, white or coloured[;] it was a campaign for the broader democratization of sport . . . aimed at the improvement of the breed by training and the enhancement of the motherland.4
Jornal dos Sports was both gushing and creepy: ‘Miracles of belief and enthusiasm are the hallmark of Flamengo . . . Beings barely awakened to life have let themselves get carried away by these two beautiful emotions: paternal love and an interest in physical culture.’5 The club and the press ran a competition asking children to submit the best sentence that they could including the words Flamengo and Brazil. The winners included ‘Flamengo teaches you to love all things about Brazil’ and ‘Flamengo: Brazil’s sentinel’.
Although Padilha had made the key structural changes that would turn Flamengo into the people’s champion, he was not able to bring a championship to the club, nor in the end was there much room for the people. The club accepted their ticket money, but it remained an operation entirely controlled from above. Both of these deficits were remedied over the next decade. The key figure in this case came from the other end of the social spectrum. Jaime Rodrigues de Carvalho was born in 1911 in Salvador and, as part of the great internal shift of the poor north-east to the growing cities of the south, arrived on a boat in Rio in 1927. His first experience of football in the city was watching Fluminense but when he returned to the club to see the team train he found his way barred. Down the road Flamengo’s squad trained in the open and, thus drawn to them, he never left. For five years he climbed the stadium’s walls, begged for money for tickets and asked players for spares until he landed a lowly but steady clerical job in the Ministry of Justice. It was precisely this kind of state employment that drew immigrants to the cities, and for the few that could get a job it transformed their lives. Carvalho, a poor provincial mulatto immigrant, was now able to become a Flamengo sócio, marry a Portuguese woman and buy his ticket to watch the club, and not just the football: he attended all of Flamengo’s rowing regattas until the late 1940s as well.
Carvalho first came to public attention in 1942. On the eve of the final and decisive game of that year’s Carioca Championship he personally raised Flamengo’s flag over their clubhouse and stayed up all night with a giant roll of calico and red and black dye making a huge flag for the next day. On it were emblazoned the words ‘Avante Flamengo!’ He arrived at the stadium, not only with the flag, but with a band of over a dozen other fans equipped with a trombone, trumpets and drums. Initial reactions were mixed. The crowd and the club officials seemed to like them, but Ary Barroso commentating on the radio thought the band unspeakable and nicknamed them the charanga – the
out-of-tune band. Undeterred, the charanga made their own Flamengo shirts and placed hand-stitched harps on them as their club badge. They also began to attend away games and use the open space of the geral – the standing zones around the pitch – to get close to their opponents and distract them with their music. After Flamengo scored a fourth goal against São Cristóvão under these conditions the referee banned the charanga from the ground. The case went to court, but the football authorities were supportive, with both Mário Filho and Vargas Neto, head of the Rio Football Federation, arguing that football needed this kind of spontaneous spectacle from the crowd.
It might not have been the charanga, but something was working. At last, in 1942, Flamengo won the Carioca title and went on to win the next two, their own tricampeonato. The final victory of the three was recorded in Mário Filho’s short story, ‘Carnaval na Primavera’, in which he claimed that the game began with a bang so loud that police on duty had fallen to the ground. It wasn’t quite like that but the game did see plenty of pyrotechnics. For some time TOV (Torcida Organizada do Vasco), the new fan group created at Vasco da Gama (and emulators of the Flamengo charanga), had been putting on the best firework displays before matches. With Flamengo facing Vasco in the key game of that season, Jaime de Carvalho decided to upstage them by taking a home-made bomb to the game. It didn’t blow anyone off the field but it completely filled the stadium with smoke and set a precedent for their use. When, at the end of the match, Flamengo emerged as champions again, the band and thousands of supporters took to the streets to celebrate. While this kind of behaviour might have panicked some ruling elites and led perhaps to a ban on fan groups or fireworks, Brazil’s chose to co-opt these new energies. Equipped with club endorsement and commercial sponsorship, and the blessing of the football authorities, Jaime de Carvalho was made the official cheerleader for the Brazilian team at the 1950 World Cup, completing his journey from penniless Salvadorian immigrant to the nation’s leading fan. As we shall see, such an office was a mixed blessing.
III
The Estado Novo may have engaged with Brazilian popular culture, even publicly celebrated it, but it was not, in its elite and conservative heart, entirely happy with its content and meanings. The attitude of many of the regime’s most senior functionaries is encapsulated by this civil servant’s thoughts on the regime’s policy towards samba: ‘We recognize that all the rude illiterate louts who live in our cities are frequently linked to civilization through music.’6 This kind of attitude certainly shaped the treatment of carnival by the Estado Novo and its predecessors.
Rio’s first carnival was held in 1641, decreed by the colonial government to commemorate the restoration of the Portuguese monarchy. It became a wild and unpredictable affair combining Afro-Brazilian dance and music with hordes of wild Portuguese young men on a rampage through the town. By 1900 the Rio authorities had excluded the rampages and required participants in carnival to register, policing the event to keep the popular carnival clear of the private parties and masked balls of the wealthy. The emergence in the early twentieth century of the Escolas de Samba – grassroots but organized samba bands and dance clubs – ensured an enduring presence for the poor at carnival. Under Vargas, in return for subsidies and cash payments to cover floats and costumes, the Escolas were required to toe the patriotic line; the theme had to be tame enough that the regime could use a sanitized carnival as one of its main attractions to foreign tourists.
Thus the Estado Novo’s attitude to carnival and samba was double-edged. On the one hand it welcomed them as powerful examples of a distinct Brazilian culture that had safely absorbed its African cultural heritage. On the other hand they were a zone of danger, immorality and potential disorder that required co-option and control. A similar ambivalence can be detected in the regime’s attitude to football. For all the celebrations of the game as the route to the nation’s demographic renewal, and footballers’ roles as missionaries of hygiene and good healthy patriotism, it was clear to all that in an era of professionalism this was no longer, if it ever had been, the case. The rise of star players whose popularity and wealth rested on their footballing skills rather than their moral probity was a persistent challenge to the regime’s version of football. Leônidas and Fausto were the most famous players who failed to conform to the authorities’ austere norms of humility and obedience, but they were hardly alone. Fausto was, in the end, consumed by high living and low drinking. Leônidas, although occasionally corralled by the regime into supporting its labour laws, lived a life diametrically opposed to the sober patriotic workers the Estado Novo hoped to mould. He was a high-flying celebrity and hard-nosed businessman, excruciatingly handsome, powerfully photogenic, showing off the latest threads, parading on Rio Branco on the day after a game to take the public’s acclaim. What bothered the authorities was not only the dissolute bohemian lifestyles of the stars, but the deeper linkages that were being made between Brazilian football and the lifestyle and culture of the malandro. The malandro was a stock figure of Brazilian culture – the hustler, the street smart, an urban warrior living on his wits and his charm. Leônidas walked, talked and seemed to play with the same improvisational spontaneity and street cunning, his signature move the balletic bicycle kick.
This tension between the regime’s conservatism and the new ideas and forces it could never fully control can be seen in three key areas of popular culture: football on the radio, and football as a subject of music and cinema.
Radio was the main way in which football was actually consumed by most Brazilians in the 1930s and 1940s. It provided a welcome addition to the otherwise rather limited output of the stations, which were heavily reliant on operatic music and the occasional drama. Commentators were therefore pivotal in shaping how football was received and understood. In the early 1930s, Nicolau Tuma and Armando Pamplona were the leading figures. Pamplona was always the slightly stuffy master of ceremonies, while Tuma’s delivery began to speed up and acquire a staccato rhythm that saw him nicknamed ‘Speaker Metralhadora’ – the Machine Gun. Gagliano Neto was the safe pair of hands during the late Vargas era. Advertised to the public as a ‘Speaker Esportivo Perfeito’, he was the man who covered Brazil’s progress, live, at the 1938 World Cup in France.
While all three commentators stayed within the bounds of the regime’s sanitized and patriotic model of football, the late 1930s and 1940s did see the emergence of a much more partisan and exuberant coverage of the game, typified by Ary Barroso. Barroso rose to fame in the newly fashionable Copacabana area primarily as a composer, but also as a writer, painter, local councillor and fanatical Flamengo fan. His commentary was witty, fantastical and deeply partisan. In an effort to be heard above the crowds he bought a harmonica from a toyshop and took to signalling goals with a sprightly trill. When the opposition scored he emitted a rasping screech or a doleful dropping note. Some opponents considered his presence and his partisanship so disturbing that he was refused entrance to their stadiums and forced to commentate from the rooftops of nearby houses with a view of the ground. Apocryphally he was said to have descended to the touchline during a match in Buenos Aires to commentate on a close game between Brazil and Argentina, and was so vocally partisan that he ended up being attacked by Argentinian fans and officials.
Rebello Junior began his commentating career in the maniacal, breathless context of horse racing, and brought the intensity of that to his coverage of football. He is credited, in the early 1940s, with the first extended, orgasmic goal celebrations, the ‘goooooooooooooooolll!!!!!’ that has become the cliché of Latin American commentary. At the time there was a school of thought that considered it excessive. Nicolau Tuma argued, ‘I think the long-form announcement of a goal is a waste of time. When an announcer says “gooooooooooool” and it takes twenty seconds, the listener just wants to know who it was that scored.’ However, Brazilian radio was a competitive and innovative business with a huge popular market; restraint was never going to be its strong suit. Thus, not conten
t with just one commentator, radio stations began to have two in the stands and at least one somewhere on the touchline. Jorge Curi and Antônio Cordeiro pioneered the radio football double act, while the later role was exemplified by the jocular Geraldo Blota. Blota began by calling offsides from the touchline but soon graduated to disturbing goalkeepers from behind their net, interviewing players and coaches during the game, and as increasingly happened in Brazilian club football, stepping on to the pitch during a match to talk to someone. In 1949, in a brilliantly executed hoax, Geraldo de Almeida called a game between São Paulo and a European opponent. São Paulo lost 7–0, until it was revealed the next day, 2 April, that it had all been invented. It was not a feature that would have made it to the Hora do Brasil.
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